Paul and Romans. Part 1

Edwin Clarke

Sunday, 25 July 2023

Men were promised that if they went to the lunch that Yvonne hosts on the first Tuesday of

the month every effort would be made to talk about cars and DIY stuff instead of high

fashion and brilliant grandchildren. The last couple of times I have been I was somewhat

startled but also delighted that my main topic of conversation was St Paul. On the first

occasion it was about the difficulty of the book of Romans and on the second I was told in the

strongest possible terms that St Paul is boring.

Is St Paul boring? Never! He is one of the most interesting and stimulating writers you could

come across, though I admit, that with 2000 years separating us it is sometimes hard for

modern people to see where he is going. Part of the blame for that must lie in the way we

read the Bible. We get tiny doses of Bible each Sunday from the lectionary. Thus we are

reading Romans at the moment, and throughout this year generally we will read our gospel

from Matthew. But we only get little bits, and those little bits we read don’t allow the big

picture to emerge. Maybe you remember the late, disgraced Rolf Harris of sordid shame. He

put a few dabs of paint here and there on a big white sheet, and it turned from a puzzlement

into a big picture. In church we don’t get to see the big pictures painted in the Bible book just

two or three daubs on a canvas; imagine if you were given a couple of spoons of sultanas, a

pinch of salt, some flour and a wee bit of baking powder and half a glass of milk. Is it for a

scone, a fruit cake, or a self-saucing pudding? Or could it be that the half glass of milk has

escaped from the Cadbury’s factory. No wonder we think Paul boring if we never hear or

understand the story he tells.

So this morning because those conversations about Paul and the lectionary reading from

Romans blend together I am going to talk to you about Paul and about Romans in particular.

Romans is actually not all that hard, especially if you begin from the bottom up. For, you see,

Paul is writing to the church in Rome - to people he had never met in a place he had never

been, unlike those other churches to whom he wrote letters. But going to Rome was on his

bucket list, something to do before he died. If going to Rome was currently over his horizon,

writing to Rome was not, so he writes this letter to introduce himself to the Christians there.

It is just as you might do if you were applying for another job, or if you were a minister

wanting to connect with another parish. You might write a summary of your life story, your

education, you might demonstrate how you can set goals and achieve them, and are just the

one to get results. Paul does none of that. He writes only his beliefs. You see, we ought to

approach Romans as we would a showcase or a shop window in which Paul puts his theology

on display. When we read Romans, we should think Michael Hill Jewellers who are good at

showcases.

Curiously enough, when I look at the showcase that is Romans it contains nothing

particularly hard or even strange. The first half of Romans is about sin, the next quarter is

about salvation, and the last quarter about service. Sin, salvation and service, these are the

three things you will find in Paul’s showcase. Out of these three things Paul will construct a

big picture, just as you, quite likely, will have done already as you have put together your

own theology over the course of years. But as our lectionary passage this morning comes

from Romans 6 from out of the first half, the sin half, you will get only the first of his great

themes: sin.

It may be, too, that you will sense why Paul puts sin first of all into the showcase when you

hear the first couple of verses of our reading. Should we continue in sin that grace may

abound? In other words, since sin is fundamentally God’s problem to sort and fix, shall we

leave it to God and go on our merry way? By no means, says Paul. μη γενοιτο is the Greek

phrase he wrote, which has the connotation of being horror struck, total dismay, the sinking

feeling you have when you come out of church and find all four tyres of your car are flat, in

other words the kind of thing you never want to happen. And that is sin in a nutshell: the kind

of thing we never want to happen. But the reality is that it does. Some people think Paul is

too much into sin, and it is true that he spends a lot of energy contemplating the harm it does,

but always for Paul it comes back to this: sin makes happen the very things we don’t want to

happen, so μη γενοιτο, God forbid.

Paul leaves out of Romans a great deal of his personal life story, he would say it doesn’t

belong in the showcase. But we do know he was a devout and ardent Pharisee. The early

years of his life shaped and formed his faith as they do for all of us, and that raises the

question, was there anything in Pharisaism that shaped Paul’s faith. Sin is in, the Pharisees

were keen on sin as we know from the gospel story. And though it is not as obvious the belief

in uncleanliness is the Pharisaic twin to sin. Paul would have been brought up in all the ways to counter

uncleanliness. Uncleanliness for the Pharisee is not a matter of hygiene or of dirt, not a

grubby mark that comes out with Persil, but it is the limitation of being mortal, of being less

than and different from God. Death, touching a dead body, makes people unclean because

death is of humanity not of divinity. Women with periods or in childbirth are unclean because

mortals have to replenish the race, divinity doesn’t propagate. There is no moral fault or

failing in being unclean, it is just the way it is, a fundamental blemish upon us for being less.

Uncleanness is a way of marking the boundary between the sacred and the secular, it is not

evil or bad. Anglicans and Catholics retain a concept of uncleanness around the sacrament,

especially when the sacrament is understood as the real presence of Christ. The real presence

demands we enclose it in a monstrance, separate it, protect it from the taint of the profane,

keep it in special vessels, handled by special people, or as moderns would say: give it due

respect.

Now it is in this context of thinking deeply about humanity separated from divinity

highlighted by the ritual practice of uncleanliness that Paul shapes his doctrine of sin because

the places where we fall into sin are the very places where our mortality throws up barriers

and boundaries. We get tired and don’t think straight, and our weariness makes us self-

centred. We become afraid that we may be pushed off our rung on the ladder of life; but we

ourselves would like to go three or four rungs up on the ladder of life where life appears to be

more comfortable and secure, and we end up being jealous or greedy or out of sorts, and so it

goes on. For God made us in God’s own image which means that we long for more, much

more than mortality can ever give, and in the process sin is born. The young brother doesn’t

want to be a dogsbody to his older brother and the farm can only have one boss, so was it

wrong to take his money and run? But what does he say to his father when he comes back

home? Father, I have sinned... He has forced his way over the boundary line not because he

wanted to do a bad thing but because he wanted more, which is what humans do, it is exactly

this wanting more which makes us pull the apple from the tree.

This kind of sin, born out of our mortality, realised at the interfaces of our human existence is

in us all. That is why Paul wrote that all have sinned, for all of us are tired, afraid, anxious,

ambitious, hesitant, craving for a transcendence of which we are incapable. We live out of

the limitations of our body, mind and soul. So when Paul puts sin in his showcase he is really

saying to the Romans, let’s talk about our world and face up to the mess it gets itself into, and

the way that despite ourselves things go wrong. This is one of the essential themes of human

conversation. And despite our not wanting to talk about sin, which we might say is boring,

the world’s greatest art and literature and poetry are about what it is to be human, and what it

is that drives us to be more than human. O wretch that I am, who shall deliver me from the

body of this death?

When it is my turn next month we will be in the next section of Romans, the salvation

section, and we can see what Paul will put in his showcase. In the meantime you might like to

do some homework, do it when the TV ads come on and there are those three or four minutes

when you have muted the sound and have a little empty space to fill.

Question 1: Has there ever been a time when your humanness, tiredness, grief, fear, anxiety

turned you away from a good outcome?

Question 2: See if you can find an answer to the problem and predicament of sin, so firmly

embedded in human life?

And lastly, a reminder of my text for the day: Paul’s showcase: Sin. Salvation. Service.